Clowns Attack Hospitals: The Creation Process

How Is Clowns Attack Hospitals Created?
The process for creating Clowns Attack Hospitals is lengthy and thorough. We don’t simply sit down and write a bunch of ideas all at one time. Ideas are passed back and forth through texts and messages for many months. Once we have more ideas than we could possibly need to fill a 144 card set, the editing process begins.

Facebook and text messages containing card ideas are prefixed with “cah”, allowing us to search for and find those messages easily. Of course this prevents us from having any friends named Micah.

First of all, we painstakingly analyzed all of the official Cards Against Humanity expansions to determine how their sets are balanced for both white and black cards. For white cards we looked at how many verbs there were versus nouns, the length of cards, plurality, and several other factors. For black cards we looked at subject matter, style, and the amount of cards with multiple blanks.

We did a detailed breakdown of the cards in the official Cards Against Humanity expansions so that our own sets would be balanced similarly to theirs.

During our editing process, we split all of our white card ideas up into verbs and nouns and then further down into about 15-20 categories. Because of our analysis of the official expansions, we know how many cards we want to fall into these categories. For white cards we have lightly increased the balance toward verbs, just as a personal preference.
We then rate our card ideas from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) based upon a variety of factors: uniqueness of concept, how much they make us laugh, actual gameplay quality, and so on.

A rating of 10, 9, or 8 is basically a mortal lock for making the cut. It starts to get iffy around 7 and 6.

To ascertain the gameplay quality, we test our white cards with black cards and we test our black cards with white cards. We use a lot of cards from other sets, both official and third party, in testing our cards. Of course not all cards have to be funny on their own. Seemingly innocuous or boring white cards can often be amazing when paired with the right black card and finding the right balance of those is very important to the overall balance of the set.

Trust us, this card plays fantastically.

After we have the cards finalized, we use a spreadsheet containing all of the professionally printed expansions to thoroughly search for duplicate cards or extremely similar ideas. Afterward, we replace cards or make adjustments as needed and then we start building the cards in photoshop. As the cards are being created, we research and add product trademarks where needed. Our cards utilize a different font from Cards Against Humanity and also feature a splash of color on the front of the card. These are two features that differentiate our set visually so that our cards won’t be confused with theirs.

We take pride in holding our cards to a similar standard as the official game, while respecting them by differentiating our own cards visually.